'22 Snowflake Challenge #3: AUs

[brightknightie]

> "talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea"

I personally tend to think of fusions as in the crossover family, rather than the AU family. So this prompt asked me vocabulary and taxonomy as well as genre questions. On consideration, I see how fusions are often as closely related to AUs as they are to crossovers -- a kind of convergent evolution, perhaps!

For myself, I had long thought of Alternate Universe as the overarching top-level category that includes all the kinds of contradictions to and divergences from canon. This would have every degree of branched, parallel, and "total" (coffee shop and so on). Basically, I had thought of anything that didn't intend to fit into, follow from, or cap off canon as it existed at the time of the story as an AU.

From the replies I've seen to this meme prompt, it sounds like the more current understanding of "AU" has largely shed the most modest tier of canon tinkering, and now more usually means the broadest tier: the "total" AUs. Is that about right?

For many (many!) years, I would have said that I don't enjoy AUs.

Or, rather, that I enjoy only those AUs that are specifically "What if?"s from within canon. Those grounded "What if?" divergences appeal easily to me; I know where they fit and how to enter them, and feel that my investment in the canon characters and circumstances should continue to pay off throughout the divergence.

I particularly love long-hiatus FK fanfic, which at the time was of course following on from canon, but such stories that are new today are necessarily an AU divergence between seasons one and two, denying, avoiding, or discounting the canon of seasons two and three. (As you know, more than a year passed in the real world between FK's seasons one and two, and then many things changed with "Killer Instinct." And I just like first season better for myself. There was such hope and strength in first season.)

I enjoyed OUaT AUs that included Mulan with the rest of the Storybrook characters from the very beginning, on her own merits, if unseen by the cameras, and didn't wait for canon to loop her in seasons down the road as an auxiliary to Aurora and Philip. I especially embraced the construction that this unseen-but-obviously-there Storybrook!Mulan was a US veteran.

I have become increasingly fond of a wider range of "What if?" constructions over the years. I just still do like best when I can spot the point of divergence in some way.

"Total" AUs seem very rare in my own most-beloved fandoms. They just don't seem to come up very often. Maybe I would like them if I met them! Yes for myself, who is not an expert in AUs, it's challenging to imagine characters who are so defined by their unusual circumstances into significantly different circumstances, and yet remain the same people. A Nick who is not a vampire who wants to be human? A Duncan who does not have to hold on to his humanity through the alienation of immortality? It would be, effectively, removing the multifaceted fantasy metaphors and grounding the character in a single interpretation of that metaphor, which could be fine... but could also be up for accusations of oversimplification? Tricky.

The people of BSG78 could be made survivors of just about any historical atrocity, but by removing the sci-fi fiction buffer, would it not risk becoming trivializing of the real tragedies? Perhaps a fictional tragedy, just a different one, would work for BSG78, like a high-school AU but after a shooting, or a coffee shop AU but after a riot. Um. Yeah, my dearest fandoms are often grim under the surface, I know. :-) I suppose BSG78 could always become overtly the Wagon Train AU it has covertly been all along. Yes, it fuses into mythical Old West territory smoothly, come to think of it, as long as we leave the inciting incident unspoken.

D&DC... would require an alternate group bonding experience. Kidnapped by aliens? Drafted into a military?

That said, in other people's fandoms, now! I went through a period of reading actually quite a lot of Stargate: Atlantis total AUs. I enjoyed them very much! I even helped beta a couple, gracious. But I'd seen only a handful of canon episodes and had no investment in the intricacies of canon, so I didn't really know what I was reading, as such, except vivid characters with lots of expressive snark. I could have nearly been reading original fic, for all I knew about any underlying commentary on the genuine IP canon.

(Stargate and X-Files are my best friend's dearest fandoms. I know them mainly by osmosis.)


What do you think? Do "total" AUs go with my dearest fandoms better than I yet realize?

Comments

[lightbird]

Yeah, I tend to think of fusions as pretty much interchangeable with crossovers, at least that's the way I've written my two crossovers: a character from one fandom is put in the world of the other character.

However I do distinguish between canon divergence/fork-in-the-road works and true AUs. To use a fandom in common as an example, there are plenty of canon divergent FK fics, particularly with regards to the outcome of the series finale. But I don't consider those true AUs because the setting, concept, and themes have remained the same. Vampires are a thing, Nick is both a vampire and a cop, and he's both looking for a cure for his condition and trying to atone for his past actions. Only the outcome diverges. A true AU would change some of the basis of the canon - a mundane setting, for example, where there are no vampires.

[brightknightie]

Yes, thank you: that's what I'm seeing as the more common usage today than the one I used to understand -- that any branch in canon, no matter how wide the divergence, isn't a "real" AU. Even Trek's Mirror Universe is apparently not considered an AU, because it technically diverged from the prime reality at a historical point.

If divergence and "What if?" scenarios are not a sub-type of AU, is there another category name for them -- a term that identifies them as distinct from strictly canon-compliant stories?

[lightbird]

So, on AO3 the tag actually is "Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence". So it seems that at least a large part of fandom still considers it a subcategory of AUs. "Canon Divergence" and "Fix-it" (where it does fix things) also work as terms to distinguish it as a different type of AU. I personally do use the different terms because while I like canon divergence fics that are still rooted in the canon, I'm much more picky when it comes to AUs where everything is changed to a completely different setting etc. and those really need to work to win me over. So for me there is a difference.

The Star Trek Mirror Universe is an interesting example here, because the parallel universe is part of the canon, and is definitely a concept across a lot of science fiction.

[senmut]

Alternate Universe is a catch all for me. From canon-adjacent to 'total', anything that changes a single detail, even if it is just building on canon (post-canon, for instance), it is an AU.

Fusion is very much a specific KIND of AU, wherein you import traits or characters into a different setting.

Crossovers I see as different from fusion, though still a subset of AU, as they keep settings, traits, and characters as close to their own canons as possible, while allowing for interaction between them. These can vary from letting the Barney Miller precinct have a case that involves the Taxi setting and crew, to actually having a spatial rift that introduces the Enterprise to the Death Star (Enterprise wins, IMHO).

I am far more likely to write fusions than true crossovers. And fusions are one of my favorite versions of AUs, with both canon-divergent and time travel AUs as the other favorites.

(Many of my introspective pieces are canon-adjacent, as I am just trying to get the character mind sets in a 'this could have happened'.)

[brightknightie]

That's the definition of AU that I've always known and been most comfortable with! :-)

Fusions, I'd previously thought of as in the crossover family because, I'd thought, there were two fandoms being fused. However, I've now seen it pointed out that people approach fusions as not "one fandom plus another fandom," or "one fandom into another fandom," but rather "one fandom into another genre," which, yes, I do understand must be an AU instead of a crossover!


Enterprise v. Death Star... which Enterprise, which Death Star, which point in history, and how much time are we going to spend gathering intel and trying to open negotiations and angsting about the Prime Directive before we fire... ;-)

(Almost always Enterprise, though, for sure.)

[pj1228]

I agree that it depends on the definition of AU whether I like that or not. Originally I thought AU would be a scennario where the characters are set in a completely different setting, for instance FK in space. I think that's what's now meant with "total AU". That's something I probably would not like so much as I prefer FK just the way it is. That's why I usually name AU as one of the items on my non-preference list for the fkficfest.

However, some people seem to think of canon divergence also as AU. I wouldn't be opposed to that and wouldn't regard it as AU.

I've never encountered the term "fusion" in the context of fandom before.

[brightknightie]

According to TV Tropes, a "fusion fanfic" is "a variety of crossover fic where two or more works are merged together into one (usually) cohesive setting." This is different from a normal crossover, in that a "fusion" usually aims at a much more thorough and permanent cohesion of the two works that fundamentally changes at least one of the realities, while a standard "crossover" tries to maintain both realities as intact as possible.

A funny example on that page "fuses" the cute-animal "Hello Kitty" into the mecha-scifi "Warhammer 40K," such that neither original universe continues to exist, and instead there is a total merger of the two, with the characters of one mostly replacing the characters of the other.

However, what I'm seeing now is that fewer people seem to regard "fusion" as necessarily a kind of crossover. Instead, people seem to see putting a single fandom into a different genre as a "fusion," or putting a single character from one fandom into another without explaining how she got there as a "fusion" (whereas a traditional crossover would have some explanation).

[skieswideopen]

I think you're right that people do tend to use "AU" as shorthand for "total AU," although I notice in exchange sign-ups, many people will explicitly note that they're okay with canon divergence when disallowing AUs, so I don't think the two categories have been completely divorced.

Crossovers and fusions tend to get grouped together--crossover exchanges, for example, often allow fusions as well. However, I agree with others that they're not really the same thing. Having an unexplained spatial anomaly bring the Enterprise and Galactica together for an unexpected encounter is a bit different from making Apollo a lifelong Starfleet officer instead of a colonial pilot.

Personally, I love crossovers and rarely care for fusions. I generally prefer characters to be who they are in canon, with the same backgrounds, which fusions tend not to have. Crossovers, on the other hand, play into my love of outsider POVs. They're often an excellent chance to see characters from one fandom react to characters from the other with an outsider's eye.